Generally described, the ubiquity of graphical user interfaces (GUI) and communication networks, such as the World Wide Web, have promoted the success of e-commerce and online transactions. The availability of network-based resources, such as Web sites, to consumers has made shopping more convenient and less costly by reducing the need to commute to physical stores to purchase goods and services. For example, by means of a Web browser, a user can shop for many different goods and services. For businesses, goods and services can be offered to customers across the town, across the country, or across the world.
At the same time that e-commerce provides added opportunities for businesses, it also creates new competition. Consumers are no longer limited in what they can buy by geographic location. As such, the user experience of an online service becomes of paramount importance. Consumers are, for example, more likely to shop at Web sites where product and service information are provided more conveniently and are more relevant to what the consumer is seeking.
From the point of view of businesses, providing a Web site which enhances user experience and reduces cost of development and maintenance to the business can be an important consideration. Traditionally, commercial Web sites have built individual static Web pages that include such product and service information. Such static Web pages are updated as new information becomes available or new products/services are offered to customers. For example, if an item is offered as part of a promotion, the Web page featuring that item is manually updated to reflect the new information. Such manual or semi-manual updates to Web pages are expensive and time consuming.
In addition to the dynamic nature of advertising and promotion of products/services, consumers have a wide variety of devices that they can use to browse different Web sites and shop for goods and services. For example, consumers can also view content from a wide variety of computing device displays that offer varied sizes for rendering content. Additionally, personal digital assistants (PDA), smart mobile phones, television set-top boxes, and a variety of other digital equipment may now be used to browse the content stored on remote devices and purchase goods and services. Static content is optimized to be displayable of many different available displays, often with a focus on ensuring that the entire content can be displayed on smaller sized display. Thus, the static content, especially advertising content which needs to be changed often due to the dynamic nature of advertising, is often displayed with additional unused “white space” for displays that have more available display area.